Eight over 80

William Conway, 90

Bill Conway bought a small silica sand producer and turned it into a billion-dollar company. He did so at the age of 50.

"I had a very successful career in the so-called C-suite," he said. "And yet, I wanted to do something on my own."

With the help of friends, he was able to finance the purchase of Walter C. Best Inc. in Chardon. That became the foundation of what is now Fairmont Santrol.

After graduating from Yale University, Conway went to work for then Pickands Mather & Co., a major Cleveland-based supplier of raw materials to the steel industry and one of the nation's four major ore houses. Around 1965, he was sent to Australia to open an iron ore mine. The experience gave him a taste, and whet his appetite, for running his own company.

When he bought Best Sand in 1978, Conway went from working for large corporations to owning a private mining operation with about 65 employees. Even though he owned a small company, Conway recognized it was important to run Best Sand like a large corporation. He developed a board of directors to have experienced advisers as grew the company.

"When opportunities came our way, because of my experience and my education, I was able to see the chances to grow, and I took advantage of those opportunities with the help of a lot of other people," he said.

In 1980-81, Best Sand started supplying fracturing sand to Halliburton Services. That introduced the company to the oil and gas market, now a significant portion of Fairmount Santrol's business.

A few years later, Conway partnered with Chuck Fowler, an industrial sand veteran and president of sand operations at Martin Marietta Corp. to purchase Wedron Silica in Wedron, Ill.. They merged Best Sand and Wedron Silica to create Fairmount Minerals in 1986. Then, in 1991, Fairmount purchased Technisand Inc. and Santrol from British Industrial Sand, along with its sand-coating technologies.

Conway stepped down from being president and CEO in 2013, a year before the company changed its name to Fairmount Santrol and became a publicly held company on the New York Stock Exchange. The company is in the process of merging with Unimin Corp., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Belgium's SCR-Sibelco NV.

Conway still serves on the board of directors and as an active consultant for the company.

"In no way did I anticipate we would end up as a New York Stock Exchange-listed mining company with over $1 billion in listed sales and over 1,000 employees throughout the country," he said. "It has grown well beyond my wildest dreams, and obviously I'm proud of that, but I'm most proud of the people who made it happen."

He is also proud of the fact that the company can support the communities where it operates, part of Conway's lifelong "Do good, do well" commitment.

Since his time at Pickands Mather, he has been involved with the United Way. In the mid-2000s, he chaired a task force looking at opportunities to grow Geauga County. The group concluded businesses had to take a more active role and subsequently established the Geauga Growth Partnership in 2010 to make sure more businesses helped each other.

"You can't operate in a silo," he said. "Your business activities and your actions need to take care of the community. Any business is dependent, in many ways, of that community, whether it be through public services or supplying the workforce."

Tracy Jemison, a former Geauga County commissioner, said Conway has been a longtime cheerleader for economic development in Geauga County and Northeast Ohio. Jemison worked with Conway on the task force and now serves as president of Geauga Growth Partnership.

"The vision he offered at those meetings is truly one of the main reasons why Geauga Growth Partnership now has 170 members and is recognized as the leading business organization in the county," Jemison said. "It's because we had people like Bill who had that passion to move the community forward."

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